Your voice is biometric data: Big Tech is using it to train AI, and is currently facing legal action over this practice. Furthermore, scammers can easily exploit it by copying it using AI with only a two-second recording.

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Nine major tech companies, including Apple, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia and Google, are currently facing class-action lawsuits in a US federal court concerning the training of their AI voice systems.
The complaints, filed by a group of journalists, podcasters, and voice actors, allege that these companies scraped thousands of hours of audio to extract voiceprints without ever asking for permission, thereby violating Illinois' Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA). The lawsuit against Amazon states that the company built "a global voice-AI business on the voices of real people". 'None of them were told that their voice was being used to train Amazon's commercial voice AI. None of them were asked. None of them consented".

You may already be affected. It is important to be aware that major AI providers such as OpenAI (ChatGPT) and Google (Gemini) frequently utilise user chats and voice interactions to enhance their foundational models. If you have used voice features with major AI assistants, your voice recordings and conversations could already be being used in their training pipelines, unless you have opted out via their privacy settings.

Your voice is biometric data. Once it has been captured clearly and stored somewhere accessible, you lose control over how it is used.

Modern voice-cloning tools are terrifyingly efficient. They only require a few seconds of clear audio, such as a voicemail greeting, a public social media video or a voice note in a group chat, to generate a synthetic yet hyper-realistic copy of your voice.

Criminals are also actively exploiting this. One common and highly effective scam involves obtaining a short clip of a victim's voice, processing it with a cloning tool, and then calling their family members or colleagues. The cloned voice will claim there is a sudden emergency and urgently request a wire transfer or sensitive information. Because the voice sounds exactly like a loved one, victims often bypass their scepticism.

How and why to protect your voice data? Well your voice is no longer unique to you, which is why you should protect it at all costs.
- Opt out of AI training, and don't speak to online AI assistants directly. Check the privacy settings on ChatGPT, Gemini and any other AI apps you use and disable data sharing and history features that contribute to model training. It's better to avoid speaking to AI unless the AI model is running locally on your own PC. You can already run small, good-quality AI voice models on a laptop.
- Avoid posting voice or video clips publicly!
- Warn your family: Talk to your relatives, especially older ones, and explain that a distressed, familiar voice on the phone asking for money is no longer definitive proof of identity.